Creating large numbers of throw away email accounts is a time-consuming and expensive aspects of a cybercriminal operation. A new service has arrived to dramatically help cut costs associated with large-spam and account creation campaigns. They do this by paying people to sell their email account credentials and letting their customers temporarily rent access to it. The service is called Kopeechka, which means penny in Russian. However don’t be fooled by the name, their service only charges a fraction of a penny per account. Their customers don’t get full access to the email inboxes that they are renting. Instead they need to configure their botnet or spam machine to use the API service. The API service will provide the working email address and access to the emails will be done by Kopeechka’s account panel. This allows the service to rent the emails to multiple customers. For those who decide to rent their emails to the service, you receive a percentage of the sales. However it’s unsure how much money one would make renting your email accounts, unless you run a botnet and have access to a large number of email credentials.
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2023/06/service-rents-email-addresses-for-account-signups/
This segment was created for the It’s 5:05 podcast